Being and Doing

Except for the past three posts I have been inactive on this blog. I'd like to let you in on a little of where I have been during those intervening months.

It all started several months ago in the depths of Winter. I was really enjoying hunkering down and staying in the cave and close to the fire. I'd be doing this and that but mostly it was a time for going within, for delving, for conserving. It wasn't the time for projects.

Then when the winter ended I started my second year of work on my vegetable garden and enjoyed the planning, building the frames, building the raised beds, enhancing the soil, and finally planting the seeds. At the same time, however, I didn't feel the urge to start writing again. It's as if my body was moving forward and my mind was active, but my spirit was still taking its own sweet time coming out of winter's cocoon.

I was reflecting on my ongoing pattern of moving between periods of activity and inactivity. In the past it would be like feeling stuck to be followed by a burst of energy which would focus on one activity or another. Sometimes those times would be brief, sometimes prolonged. After the activity I would sometimes just drag myself home to collapse, as it were, and wonder where I had been and what I had done.

But this winter I reflected more thoughtfully on that pattern and came to describe it more as being followed by doing followed by being. You can see how mindfulness can be present in both sides of that coin, and when it is there, it enhances the entire process; it makes it more present and real. The activities were sometimes purposive in a goal directed way across time, oftentimes for many years at a stretch,sometimes just a latest flash in the pan.

In the past I would be upset with the not-doing part of the cycle. Now I'm more comfortable with experiencing it as being in a space where listening is more prominent. I used to want to be pulled towards something but now it doesn't seem as important; it will happen when it happens and in its own time. Of course during either end of the dance there are certain things which have to be done of a maintenance nature but the bigger pattern is with the flowing from poised within to the directing outwardly and then the return.

It is in this context that I started thinking (for the umpteenth time) about purpose. In mid-August I was again wondering / asking what was holding me back, what the blockage was, and out of the silence came an awareness - that I do not have a central unifying principle which could give me a focal point, something which would give me a way of looking at, comparing, exploring, analyzing, experiences, events, ideas, perceptions, etc.

On reflection I came to see that the "blind spot," "the incompletion" has been there all along, certainly during my entire adult life. I have taken on others perceptions, etc., but never my own "something unique to me" (at least in a visceral way of experiencing) manner. It might be described as what my "beat" is.

In spite of this, I have been aware of hard earned lessons over the decades. Each of these learnings has been vital for my overall growth and they have served as course corrections; pivotal in fact. As these things go, they mostly came out of my own pain which in turn was coming from a wrong minded perception of how the world was or how it was supposed to be. Heroes are flawed; They have their own agendas and your best interest is not central if it does not support their agenda; a sense of power which comes from someone else, or a group, is, or can be, fundamentally manipulative; I claim the right to make mistakes, but not repetitively; I will rush no more!

All of those learnings, and others, have helped to bring me back to a sense of self but they did not go to the central unifying principle. They have helped to prepare but they have not revealed that principle.

For example, The Good Life as espoused and written by the Nearing's led to exploration and discovery and as such has been an ongoing "project" - it could even shift into a lifetime project -but it is not the principle.

Let me say it again, the core statement of my life to date is that: I am lacking a central unifying principle.

At first this freightened me but then it excited me in the quest to open, to ask for, to decipher, to find, to become aware of that central theme. And along those lines, how have others discovered their purposes. Is it "given?" Is it discovered? Is it uncovered? Does it always happen?

Now when I think of my mantra "I will rush no more!" I see it as a tool, an attitude, a way of being and doing which also lays the foundation for freeing myself up.

To be continued.